I have been getting these painful headaches as a lingering result of my concussion which thankfully have improved. And flying home was such a painful experience. I don't remember crying so much in a few short days as I have during this past week. Remembering the life of John Douglas LaDuke has been an emotional roller coaster. I loved seeing my cousins and family, but we were all mourning the loss of this amazing person. Seeing my parents and sister was fantastic, but we were there providing shoulders for each other to lean on.
Flying back to Denver has been non-stop since my arrival. On Saturday I basically came home and immediately packed up to head into the mountains to try to escape reality for a bit. Nature is always a pretty good idea for me when it comes to guaranteed happiness :) I headed up Guanella Pass and found great National Forest Land camping (aka, free, rustic, and phenomenal landscape). The highlight of the night was when two cars full of people pulled up and were motioning that that were going to camp right on our site and speaking Spanish amongst themselves... that was a close call. Luckily one of them had some sense to convince the group to keep on heading up the pass. On Sunday I summited my third 14er- Mount Bierstadt. It was super fun, and I got to meet the cutest 5 year old named Rowen! Sunday night I headed south to Mt. Princeton hot springs and camped in National Forest land by Buena Vista. This spot only had a yelper of a dog near our site!
On our way back to Denver I found out that a friend of mine, especially Jared's, overdosed this past weekend while camping with his girlfriend. She woke up Sunday morning to discover he wasn't breathing... Another life taken far, far too young. I am hurting for all of his family, especially his parents, and younger brother and sister. The four of them are in town now, and will soon be flying back to Michigan where a more expansive and formal ceremony will take place. I hope that his family will somehow be able to cope with this sudden and tragic loss.
Coping with 2 recent deaths at work is somewhat of an impossible task... Basically you don't have time for any thoughts at work outside of thinking about your students' needs, behaviors, goals, etc. Like I have mentioned before my classroom is meant to function on a 1 to 1 ratio of students to staff. When 2 staff are out with knee injuries, and 1 gets transferred to work in another classroom, the class becomes extremely unmanageable. So the past couple days have been really fun. Lots of restraints, lots of running around, lots of getting hit, yelled at, dealing with negative behaviors, and so on and so fourth. AHHHHDJAFK;WEAFKJ is basically what I was yelling all day in my head. Highlight: running between the fire alarm door and a different classroom trying to block my student from setting the alarm off and running into the other classroom to wreak havoc. Lets just say I have some battle wounds. Luckily my coworker rescued me shortly after only to stand outside with the student for 30 minutes in the pouring rain while waiting for the bus... without a jacket. Then the same coworker had to wait with another student for an extra hour because his bus broke down and they had no way to get home. What a day... and that is only the tip of the ice burg of what all occurred today. YIKES.
So... I'm hoping things settle down. Soon. My last day at work is on Friday, but I actually don't know if I'm ready...
Stay Tuned..
and PS... some pictures below from the weekend!
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